The terrible price of acquiescence

Cassandra

I heard one who said: "Verily,
What word have I for children here?
Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.

"You build it altars tall enough
To make you see but you are blind;
You cannot leave it long enough
To look before you or behind.

"When Reason beckons you to pause,
You laugh and say that you know best;
But what it is you know, you keep
As dark as ingots in a chest.

"You laugh and answer, 'We are young;
Oh, leave us now, and let us grow:'
Not asking how much more of this
Will Time endure or Fate bestow.

"Because a few complacent years
Have made your peril of your pride,
Think you that you are to go on
Forever pampered and untried?

"What lost eclipse of history,
What bivouac of the marching stars,
Has given the sign for you to see
Milleniums and last great wars?

"What unrecorded overthrow
Of all the world has ever known,
Or ever been, has made itself
So plain to you, and you alone?

"Your Dollar, Dove, and Eagle make
A Trinity that even you
Rate higher than you rate yourselves;
It pays, it flatters, and it's new.

"And though your very flesh and blood
Be what the Eagle eats and drinks,
You'll praise him for the best of birds,
Not knowing what the eagle thinks.

"The power is yours, but not the sight;
You see not upon what you tread;
You have the ages for your guide,
But not the wisdom to be led.

"Think you to tread forever down
The merciless old verities?
And are you never to have eyes
To see the world for what it is?

"Are you to pay for what you have
With all you are?"--No other word
We caught, but with a laughing crowd
Moved on. None heeded, and few heard.

-- Edwin Arlington Robinson, American poet and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

(H/T and big hugs to Cogitamus reader MR Bill)

Here's to you, Alan Grayson--A liberal turns her lonely eyes to you

I know I'm not alone in hoping that Florida Congressman Alan Grayson returns to Washington soon. He's been one of the very few Good Guys to ever represent our unique and complicated state, and now he's leaving:

"There's not any doubt about it. The people's business is not being done. There's enormous influence by lobbyists and by special interests," he says. "And the other side has completely sold out to them."

Grayson says he always resisted the influence of those lobbyists.

"A good description of what happened in my case is that they couldn't buy me, so they decided to destroy me with negative ads [during the midterm campaign] that people in my district saw an average of 70 times," he says.

Grayson responded with a controversial ad of his own. It called his opponent "Taliban Dan" and repeated clips in which Webster appeared to say about his wife "she should submit to me." Although the spot was roundly criticized, Grayson says he was justified in running it.

"We had to do it because, in my case, he ducked every debate we were scheduled to have. And the result of that is that we had no way to communicate his record except for the fact that we could run ads that people called negative ads," he says. "And it's unfortunate that the system leaves no other possibility."

Grayson says the ad was a last resort.

"The average voter in Orlando saw that ad twice. The average voter in Orlando saw 70 ads calling me, an incumbent Congressman, a liar, a national embarrassment, a loudmouth, a dog and an evil clown," he says. "So I don't think that my opponents or anyone in the media for that matter — none of whom ever came to my defense — can lecture me on civility in politics."

Let's face it, this whole "civility" argument is a baldfaced joke. It's a silencing technique, really; it's what the entrenched Villagers, aka the White House press corps, call the lefty bloggers--Oooh, they're so foul-mouthed and uncivil!

But why should it be considered uncivilized to speak the plain truth? It should not be thought rude or "conversation-stopping" (ahem, Jon Stewart) to point out that Bush is a war criminal--that's exactly what he, Dick Cheney, and a slew of administration members, not to mention all the unethical (and often thieving, brutal, and/or murderous) independent contractors who profited wildly from the Iraq boondoggle, actually are.

Don't people realize that the lying war criminals who brutalized and murdered others without reproof could, as easily and with as little fear of consequences, harm them?

It's not indelicate to call out the Republicans and Blue Cross Blue Shield Dog Democrats for their pro-insurance-industry stance on health care reform (which is to say, don't reform it at all)--it's dead accurate, and Grayson, in his bold, unflinching, and courageous way, was simply doing his job as one of Florida's elected leaders.

Speaking the truth, and fighting for people instead of plutocrats.

Sadly, those who control the message are, themselves, controlled by corporations--some of which have vast defense industry sectors--who own the majority of media outlets now. It is beyond frightening, and I don't know what we can do to counteract it other than keep speaking out on the fora which remain available to us and informing and encouraging people.

They do eventually come around. Some of them do, anyway.

Minstrel Boy is often writing that democracies are historically short-lived and bloody. I often wonder if human nature, even modern-day human nature, is still not that different from the ethos of our canine brethren in that we fall into packs, each with its leader and attendant hierarchy, as opposed to running governments of the people, by the people.

I wonder if, despite the noble intentions of our more cognitively evolved individual pack members, the group at large will always, inevitably, return to the ways of the wild.

At least wolves don't lie to each other about why they're attacking something or collapse their entire social structure by selling worthless debt instruments en masse and leaving countless numbers of their pack-mates homeless and hungry while they line their own dens with yet more mink and caviar.

TSA "logic" explained: I'm going to need to see you naked before you get on your flight.

"When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon."
-- Thomas Paine

Greetings readers, and once again--*sigh*--my apologies for the long absence. (I'll spare you the boring details.)

In light of the current outrageous state of affairs with airline security--and our government's wholesale casting aside of Americans' civil rights and privacy, just because we want to go from point A to point B--I'm posting the spot-on (and dreadfully funny) Xtranormal video and strongly recommending the series of excellent TSA posts my co-blogger Lisa Simeone has been putting up at Cogitamus.

In case you're still catching up: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have, in recent months, been spending countless millions of dollars on new, intrusive full-body scanning machines that utilize a type of x-ray radiation in order to see your skin beneath your clothes. So yes, that means they get to see you naked, from top to bottom, if you want to get on board an airplane at most U.S. airports. And it means your skin gets irradiated.

Well, you do have another option, one which, in addition to being shockingly invasive and sadistic, would seem to be punitive and coercive--in other words, aimed at forcing more people to submit to the scanners: you can undergo what is euphemistically called an "enhanced pat-down".

Enhanced as in, they will grope your sexual organs and breasts, sometimes directly on the skin, often without informing you that they're going to do that--in full view of other passengers waiting in line--and ask you to remove any medical devices or prostheses so they can humiliate you by holding them up and examining them, as they did to one flight attendant who was a cancer survivor wearing a breast prosthesis after her mastectomy. Yes, they will offer "private screenings", but you won't be allowed to document their procedures on video, not unless you want to be arrested; for this reason, many passengers who wish to avoid the radiation and thus submit to the gropefest are choosing to have it done out in the open, in front of witnesses.

Have there been abuses? You betcha. Already. Head on over to Cogitamus, and scroll through Lisa's numerous posts and the attendant comment threads. A Christian cookbook author was forced to strap her baby into a stroller and was then sexually assaulted when a TSA agent groped her beneath her clothes (she has wisely retained a lawyer). Numerous women report having their shirts unbuttoned and their underwear exposed to all and sundry; some have even had their underwear pulled away from their bodies while the agent peered in, front and back.

Listen, I'm not a prude. I've gone to nude beaches; I've been dressed, undressed, and re-dressed by fashion-show folk; I've given birth three times; when I was at UF, my friends and I would regularly go skinny-dipping in one of the many lakes and sinkholes near Gainesville. Furthermore, I don't belong to any organized religion, much less one that forbids women to expose their bodies. I respect the worldview of those individuals, of course; I simply don't have a problem, myself, with voluntary nudity in the appropriate context.

No, this is not about my modesty--or the lack thereof, ahem!--or, for that matter, yours.

This is about our Fourth Amendment right to be free from intrusive and unreasonable search and seizure.

This is about our rights to be secure in our person. Our right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.

This is about our right to refuse to allow our children to have strangers touch parts of their bodies when we have all along been teaching them that only parents and doctors should touch said parts, and if someone else attempts to do that, they should scream loudly and inform a responsible adult.

This is about what it means to live in America, Land of the Free (to travel about the country) and Home of the Brave (as opposed to Home of the Pants-wetting Sheep Who Are Easily Coerced Into Giving Up Our Rights The Moment Someone Invokes The Terrorist Bogeyman).

As numerous security experts, including one responsible for the highly successful procedures at Israel's Ben Gurion airport, have noted, these scanner machines are not effective, and despite dosing you up with potentially cancer-causing radiation, they are not subject to the strict regulatory oversight, maintenance protocols, and calibration rules the way medical x-ray machines and CAT scanners are. They cannot detect some kinds of explosives, and they cannot detect anything that resides in a body cavity. Though the so-called Underwear Bomber is often cited as the reason the TSA needs to see you naked, the aforementioned experts state that these scanners probably would not have detected the type of explosives he attempted to use. It was passengers who thwarted that attack, as he succeeded only in setting his testicles on fire and embarrassing the CIA (again) when reports surfaced indicating that foreign offices had ignored the warning communiques of his own father, thus leaving him free to board an airline without setting off any alarm bells real or metaphorical.

Indeed, they are an enormous and shamefully wasteful expenditure by our government, one that was shot down by the House and somehow still foisted upon the public. A boondoggle and a giveaway to certain ex-Department of Homeland Security heads and their new, Dickensianly-named employers.

Good police work--by the FBI, for example--is what stops terror attacks before the perpetrators even get near an airport. Well-trained air marshals on select flights, metal detectors, responsible behavioral profiling by highly-trained personnel, chemical explosive detectors, and selective, secondary screening of high-risk passengers are what will keep us as safe as can be expected in a world, in a reality, where--let's face it--there are never any guarantees.

Other than this one: you are far more likely to be struck by lightening than to experience an airborne terrorist attack.

Oh, and this one: history tells us that when you give up some of your rights, you shouldn't expect to ever get them back.

Please contact your Senators and House Representatives and let them know you will not stand for these shameful, unconstitutional, and (ironically) terrorizing TSA procedures.

Meet Florida's next governor

I had not seen this footage, compiled by the Alex Sink campaign, prior to this morning--a full three days after the midterms. And I'm guessing I am a bit more politically active (and aware) than the average bear. Therefore it's a given that a sizable number of Floridians never saw it, either.

So why wasn't this--and other revelatory information about Scott that I understand to be out there--blasting from every television station on every tv set in the state, every day, for the past two weeks?

Because ad time costs a fortune, and Alex Sink did not--could not--go the Buy Yourself A State route, the way Rick Scott did here, the way Meg Whitman tried to in California. And you can be certain that the billions of dollars in anonymous (i.e. corporate and foreign) donations--the Citizens-enabled stuff that fueled the fire that boiled the tea that washed through the electorate and invigorated the frightened, angry, and newly-impoverished Old White Religious Right--were landing, disproportionately, in the rightmost coffers, not in those of struggling Democrats.

From comments at the YouTube site:

We know this video is put together. It is a campaign ad. But the fact remains that there is a very legitimate doubt about this guy. By the way, he owns many urgent care centers here in Florida. He will benefit if a legislation that is currently in the makings in Tallahassee is passed. He will benefit if Medicaid is contracted with the HMOs. If elected Gov. he will have a saying on the Medicaid-HMO contracting.

Coincidence?

Heaven (if there is one) help us. Because all hell is about to break loose.

What all the hot air boiled down to

Yesterday morning, after I'd taken my two younger sons to school and before I would take my eldest son to the polls to vote in his first-ever election, I realized my car was running low on fuel and pulled into what must be one of the last remaining full-service gas stations in America that still offers niceties like checking one's oil and tire pressure.

The gentleman on duty was an older man, although come to think of it, I am getting old myself these days, so I'd say we were contemporaries, or close to it. He asked if I'd like him to check the oil while the tank was filling.

"Just the tire pressure, please," I said.

"Where you from?" the man asked.

"England, originally. I've been here a while, though," I said.

"Well, we've got to do something about that," he said, pointing to my bumper, where an Obama/Biden sticker remains. "You should be voting conservative."

Oh dear, I thought. As much as I'd love to set him straight, I'm not sure it's a good idea to get into a political argument at this hour, particularly when I don't want to upset the person responsible for my tires being properly inflated.

"Ah...um...well, my husband is a Republican but our family supports Democrats, Republicans, AND Independents. Whomever we think is right for the office, you know?" (Which is true.)

And he said, "Well, that might have been a good strategy in the past, but look what happens to some of the Republicans, even--that Charlie Crist is not a real conservative. He turned around on his values."

At that point, I thought it best to say nothing and quietly hope for a change of subject. But the man seemed determined to make his point to me, an audience of one, captive as I was in my little steel cocoon littered with soccer gear and old detention slips: "He used to be a great pro-life candidate, but he's no better than any of the others, and turned on his values." He jabbed his finger in the air again, gesturing toward my bumper. "The ones that turn on their values need to go."

So there you have it. As if the tea-leaves, as it were, had not already coalesced so legibly, so ominously. What we saw yesterday--particularly in states like mine, among older voters--was a broad display of something I've worried about and written about so many times before, particularly with regard to Sarah Palin and her ilk: the religious fundamentalism and "Handmaid's Tale" mentality that winds through the body politic and all too often chokes off voters' other concerns, even economic ones.

This man working at the service station will not be benefiting from an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. He will not benefit when the cost of living continues to rise but his hourly wage remains effectively stagnant, as it has for decades now. He will not benefit from the billions of dollars Big Defense, Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Ag will make thanks to their new friends in government; he will not benefit as small businesses continue to go under, college costs soar out of reach for most middle class Americans, and the only career paths open to his children involve either low-paying service jobs or putting on a uniform and getting sent to the Middle East (again). To "protect our freedom" (again).

No, he will not benefit at all when the cut-out characters lined up on the puppet stage of my mechanic friend's straight-Republican ticket get their sticky little fingers on yet more levers of power.

But like far too many other white, middle-aged men and women, he supported the so-called Values Candidates and in so doing, voted against his own best interests in ways he may not even realize.

Because the wedge-issue-wielding slimebags who preach and pontificate their way into government for the sole purpose of furthering the interests of the United Corporations of America need only do one thing to get these Americans' votes:

Say they are going to Save the Babies.

Which, of course, they are not. Not the way the fundies hope they will--by rescuing Blastocyst Americans and Embryo Americans and Frozen Embryo Americans and Stem Cell Americans via the outlawing of abortion--and not the way one would hope a government would save babies, either, like not letting their city drown or their food supply be poisoned or their basic medical needs go unmet because they didn't choose wealthy parents.

The capital-C Citizens-loving Supremes are not going to mess with settled law. And the babies belonging to families who've lost their homes? The babies born into poverty for whom vital pre-school programs represent hope for an education and a better life? The babies who may never know what fresh spinach or strawberries taste like but whose little bodies will be soon be well-acquainted with the ill effects of polysyllabic food additives largely banned by the rest of the developed world; recombinant bovine growth hormone; and cheap, obesity-and-diabetes-inducing corn-sugar analogs? The babies that wind up having babies themselves, thanks to the success *cough* of abstinence-only programs and the lack of widely-available and affordable birth control? The babies who might, had their bodies and brains been appropriately nourished, have grown up and become business owners, community leaders, artists, writers, musicians, teachers, astronauts, or presidents, but who will instead continue, in ever-greater numbers and in ever-worsening health, to meander through the bleak landscape of service-work serfdom?

Those babies?

They don't get saved. They need to stop relying on government, apparently, and learn to believe in and rely on themselves, those babies. And if they can't, there will be plenty of private security thugs to keep them in line and evangelical-staffed privatized prisons to house them--no worries!

I cannot understand this country. But I do understand what happened yesterday.

Today in poetically synchronous modern fables

Mural by Bansky; Canal Street, NYC

The New York Times:

Replying to Report, Halliburton Says BP Is to Blame in Gulf

WASHINGTON — Halliburton, whose failed cement job on the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico was identified as a contributing factor to the deadly blowout by a presidential investigative panel on Thursday, is defending its work and assigning the blame for the accident to BP.

In a six-page statement issued late Thursday night, Halliburton questioned tests that showed its cement to be unstable and incapable of holding back the oil and gas in the well, saying they were conducted on different formulas than what was eventually used on BP’s doomed Macondo well. It said that a sample of the cement it planned to use on the well, tested shortly before pumping began on April 19, had produced a positive result.

But Halliburton admitted that no stability test was conducted on the actual recipe for the cement used on the well. The company said that BP had ordered a change in Halliburton’s customary formula for cement by adding a higher proportion of a chemical that slows the hardening of the mixture.

The well blew out on April 20, killing 11 workers and eventually releasing nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf. Since then, BP, Halliburton, Transocean and other partners in the well have traded accusations of blame as civil and criminal investigations proceed.

Meanwhile. Having been lovingly retrieved from the abandoned moorlands of archived digitalia where they usually float, some reanimated anonymous pixels once again have a question for Y! Answers:

Why did my rats eat each other?

I had a cage of male dumbo eared rats. They always got along and were very tame. They were not starving. They were overweight. To my horror while i was cleaning their cage i noticed the skeletal remains of their father and the smallest male half eaten in the corner. It was disgusting! Why would they turn on each other like that?? ewwww!!!

There was a restrainer below and a stomper above; see--two sides!

In a statement sent to the Associated Press, [Tim] Profitt (with Rand Paul, above) has admitted placing his shoe firmly on the face of a Lauren Valle outside a Senate debate on Monday night, but insisted that the camera angle of the footage that captured the alteration made the scuffle look worse than it was. The fact that Profitt is an official coordinator of the Rand Paul campaign opens Paul to potential civil liabilities.--SFGate

The kudzu-like proliferation of Both-Sides-ism that has all but choked off any hope of redemption, via committing real journalism (ha!), for just about every pundit, pretty face, and "reporter" these days is why I had to stop watching Morning Joe altogether. Joe Scar and Mica are, I believe, contractually obligated to say "...and we hear rhetoric like this on both sides" or "...this is a problem with both parties" or "extremists on the far right AND the far left", and so on, after any and every story in which wingnuts might conceivably look bad (which is to say, virtually all stories in which the powerful hurt the less-so, and you have to pity the poor Villagers because there's really no way to temper the sheer viciousness and lawlessness of these people other than to make vague allusions to George Soros and the incivility of lefty blogs while counting the hours until your next Georgetown cocktail party).

It matters not how uncompromisingly godawful the wingnuts' behavior might be. It matters not that both the First Amendment and American criminal law--hell, the human brain--can and do recognize a world of difference between the sticks and stones that break bones and the words that never harmed.

Because whenever an episode of violence and thuggery erupts--like the one in Alaska, when security secessionists militia military members hired goons armed with semi-automatic penis-extenders handcuffed and illegally detained a journalist at a public event for daring to do his job and ask questions of Senate hopeful Joe Miller (R-Kochsuckerville), or the one this week at a Kentucky rally, during which a Dickensian villain/Rand Paul campaign coordinator named Tim Profitt quite literally joined forces with other Randians and engaged in a little brownshirt-style aggravated assault and battery (video here, if you can stomach it) against Lauren Valle, a relatively small-framed and pixie-haired protester who had apparently donned a blonde wig, á la the FOX News bots, in order to express her opinion via the deeply threatening vehicle of satirical theatre--in which Conservatives come off as ever more dangerously unhinged and violent, you can be certain our Barbecue Media will dutifully dig through its memory banks and recall a shocking story about some member of the Professional Left who--back in...oh, 2004 it must have been--didn't like the salad dressing choices at a fundraiser dinner and registered his gustatory protest by using a napkin and water glass to moisten the corner of every place-card at the table.

Then there are all those bloggers who say fuck too much. They're so uncivilized, those hippies!

See? Both sides, people. Both sides.

Now hold still and stop getting styling gel all over my new jackboots.

(H/T Barefoot Progressive, via Prup)

Muslims wearing things: A post in which I ease back into blogging

Greetings and salutations to anyone still reading here at my little corner. I've been dealing with a rather enormous body of...stuff, I suppose I should call it. Personal stuff, work stuff, health stuff. I'll spare you the gory details.

But I'm still here, a bit better rested, and I'm very excited about matters small (the impending put-the-clocks-back-to-normal event, hooray for morning sunlight!) and momentous (the midterms, news of which has me alternately deathly worried and tentatively hopeful).

Via Amanda, check out this Tumblr, Muslims Wearing Things.


As I noted on Facebook:

Oh my goodness, who knew--Muslims wear suits and dresses and army uniforms and surgical scrubs and gowns and tiaras and track suits and swimsuits and jeans and sneakers...how will we ever know when to be afraid? *eyeroll*

What are you up to on this gorgeous fall weekend?

Better than Esther?

Vanity Fair writer Michael Gross is staying on the Palin beat, having recently published a rather chilling e-mail, sent shortly before the 2008 election, to then-VP candidate Palin by a man named Lou Engle. Gross writes:

The e-mail was written by Lou Engle, a right-wing pastor and political activist who founded a movement known as the Call, which has coordinated widespread prayer and fasting to protest health-care reform and same-sex marriage. Of the latter, he has said, “What happened to California will release a spirit that is more demonic than Islam, a spirit of lawlessness and anarchy. And a sexual insanity will be unleashed into the Earth.” Engle’s e-mail was sent to Palin as a last-minute exhortation just before she took the stage for her vice-presidential debate against Joseph Biden on October 2, 2008. It is an extraordinary document, referring to legalized abortions as a “holocaust,” and casting Engle in the role of Mordecai to Palin’s Esther.

The e-mail itself is at the VF link, as is a painting, Esther at Her Toilet (ca. 1684), by the Dutch painter Aert de Gelder. I thought it could use a little updating, so I sent it to the brilliant Blue Gal for treatment, and she happily obliged:

Do big cats like catnip?

Of course they do.

My favorite moment is when the roly-poly cheetah suddenly pauses and stares at you with this slightly guilty look on his face: I was only holding it for a friend, I swear!

Apologies for the ridiculously light posting of late. The boys have just returned to school, and I've been submerged in Mama Lioness duties, which challenges, I am here to tell you, are considerably rougher, tougher, and more formidable than those faced by Mama Grizzlies (do any little ones of any stripe or spot like getting shots and being prodded and poked?) The cubs do look rather irresistible in their freshly-pressed uniforms, though.

Hopefully I'll be able to dive back in to blogging next week. Until then,

Bon Weekend, everyone.

XXX
D.

(H/T and congratulations to four-time Daddy Lion Dr. Shadowfax)

How to do a great political ad: Dan Gelber for Florida Attorney General

Rising above--far, far above--the mudslinging and vitriol of the typical ad, this one instead imparts a strong sense of the candidate's humanity, integrity, commitment to service, and overall goodness, and in so doing, underscores Dan Gelber's obvious qualifications for a public office such as that of AG.

Bravo, Dan and bravo, Travis!

(H/T Michael)

Boléro , three ways

Instead of doing a Friday Frank post, I thought I'd riff on one of FZ's best-known "classical covers": Boléro, by French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel.

Presented here, then, is the well-loved Boléro as interpreted by three brilliant guitarists: Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, and someone new to me: an incredibly gifted thirteen-year-old named Sungha Jung. (If you've only got time to listen to one, skip ahead to Sungha's--Jeff and Frank are obviously well-known and frequently listened-to, whereas this young man deserves to be. A well-known and frequently listened-to favorite, I mean.)

Enjoy!

With Jeff Beck at the Fuji Speedway, 2006

With Frank Zappa, in Barcelona, 1988

With Sungha Jung of South Korea, age 13.

Alan Grayson on "Bozo the Spokesman" and Stockholm Syndrome at the White House

Yes, he's awesome. Yes, he's Floridian. No, we're not interested in swapping him for one of your Congresscritters, thankyouverymuch. Grayson/Franken 2016 (or sooner).

Alpha Dog of the week: Steven Slater

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Alpha Dog of the Week - Steven Slater
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes

Other than a tiny chorus of naysayers ("He lost his temper, and that's just sooo unprofessional", etc. etc.), Americans have for the most part been overwhelmingly supportive of Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who embodied the Take-this-job-and-shove-it fantasies that ever more of us are entertaining in our bowed heads these days as stressed-out, underpaid nose meets demanding, understaffed grindstone.

I, for one, have often wondered where the inflatable emergency exit slide was located. Hasn't everyone?

The Obamas are wonderful parents

La Bella de Marbella: Sasha Obama, Spain; August 6, 2010

Because despite having lived in a fishbowl for the past few years and had her every outfit, gesture, and mood dissected, critiqued, and mined for meaning beyond their simply being the outfits, gestures, and moods that could have belonged to any of us at one point or another; and despite being at an age when far too many girls feel as though the innocent and visceral joy of being alive is draining from their souls faster than cola spills from a tipped-over bottle and disappears into the sand; and despite being followed around all day and all night, by adults who say things about her and aim things at her because she is no longer child, but quarry--despite all that...

...their magnificent daughter Sasha is at once as confident as a room-storming toddler, as graceful as a trained dancer twice her age, and as utterly fearless about taking delight in the elements around her as any porpoise or cat.

I used to do just that, when we lived in the islands and I was a girl. Let the serene waves lift me from the sea floor, and in the weightless moments that followed, tilt my face to the sun and practice second position with my arms, flinging them open to what I imagined was the whole wide world.

I think I need to go to the sea again.

Image via Bauer-Griffin.

From the department of unexpected benefits: It's a jungle out there

Zoologists at the Bronx Zoo and wildlife conservation biologists working in the Guatemalan rainforest find that cloth soaked in Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men successfully attracts the attentions of various animals--particularly some very large cats.

Attention, elevator-crowding investment bankers of the world: You've been warned.

(H/T Lisa)

I break for beauty: The affirming colors of light, of poetry, and of reason

Double rainbow over Kīlauea, Hawai`i, the world's most active volcano.
I took this shot from the window of a helicopter in June 2005.

Love Sonnet IX

There where the waves shatter on the restless rocks
the clear light bursts and enacts its rose,
and the sea-circle shrinks to a cluster of buds,
to one drop of blue salt, falling.

O bright magnolia bursting in the foam,
magnetic transient whose death blooms
and vanishes--being, nothingness--forever:
broken salt, dazzling lurch of the sea.

You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,
while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,
collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:

because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,
galloping water, incessant sand,
we make the only permanent tenderness.

-- Pablo Neruda

-----

"In a stunning decision this afternoon, finding California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative banning gay marriage unconstitutional, Walker trod heavily on the path Kennedy has blazed on gay rights: "[I]t would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse," quotes Walker. "'[M]oral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest,' has never been a rational basis for legislation," cites Walker. "Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," Walker notes, with a jerk of the thumb at Kennedy.

Justice Kennedy? Hot sauce to go with those words?

But for all the lofty language about freedom and morality, nobody can fairly accuse Judge Walker of putting together an insubstantial or unsubstantiated opinion today. Indeed, the whole point of this legal exercise—the lengthy trial, the spectacularly detailed finding of facts (80 of them! with subheadings!)—was to pit expert against expert, science against science, and fact against prejudice.

It's hard to read Judge Walker's opinion without sensing that what really won out today was science, methodology, and hard work."

-- Dahlia Lithwick, for Slate

(H/T oddjob for Lithwick's summary)

Truth dispersed and disposed is truth denied: Conflicting stories about BP's oil spill in the Gulf

"...dolphins whales, seabirds fish are all floating dead on the surface of the water.. see more.. see more.. boats helicopters are scooping them away dead and dying... Whales are being exploded by the military cause they cant be carried. dead bodys as far as the eye can see air smeling of benzene ..weve seen birds fall from the sky."

-- Part of an unconfirmed text message from an anonymous
cleanup worker, at BP's oil spill, to his wife, ca. early June 2010

From today's New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form below the surface, and federal scientists believe that it is breaking down rapidly in both places. [...]

She [Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] emphasized, however, that the government remained concerned about the ecological damage that has already occurred and the potential for more, and said it would continue monitoring the gulf.

“I think we don’t know yet the full impact of this spill on the ecosystem or the people of the gulf,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

Among the biggest unanswered questions, she said, is how much damage the oil has done to the eggs and larvae of organisms like fish, crabs and shrimp. That may not become clear for a year or longer, as new generations of those creatures come to maturity.

Thousands of birds and other animals are known to have been damaged or killed by the spill, a relatively modest toll given the scale of some other oil disasters that killed millions of animals. Efforts are still under way in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to clean up more than 600 miles of oiled shoreline. The government and BP collected 35,818 tons of oily debris from shorelines through Sunday.

But Karl Burkhart of the Mother Nature Network describes a far darker and more troubling situation concerning the actual numbers of marine animals the BP oil spill has killed, and he also returns to the issue of the disturbing media blackout and no-fly zones, often enforced by armed individuals such as police officers, about which I'm sure you've already heard. In short, credentialed journalists and scientists alike were routinely barred from entering airspace over the still-gushing Deepwater Horizon well, just as they were banned from going near marshlands and beaches, including public beaches.

There are also unconfirmed reports, from cleanup workers who furtively typed text messages on borrowed cell-phones after having their own devices confiscated (and having to sign reams of confidentiality documents in order to get a much-needed job in the first place), saying that countless thousands of corpses of birds, fish, and large sea mammals were being quietly destroyed--well out of the view of citizens, independent marine biologists and animal welfare and environmental protection groups, and the press--and possibly with the help of the U.S. military. One such text message appears at the link, and while the the post's author has not been able to contact the message sender to confirm the report, he does confirm, as do the journalists themselves, that numerous well-known media figures, including CNN's Anderson Cooper, were indeed repeatedly denied access to many of the areas seriously affected by BP's oil spill (my emphasis).

According to the latest count of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Daily Collection Report (PDF), only about 4,100 birds, 670 turtles, 70 sea mammals, and 1 snake have died in the Gulf since April 20 (assuming 50 percent mortality of live animals).

It's an astonishingly low number, considering that one of the largest pods of sperm whales in the U.S. resided just miles from the site of the BP Macondo well (aka Deepwater Horizon), a region home to one of the most abundant and biodiverse marine ecosystems in the world.

Compare those small numbers with the Exxon Valdez spill ... Best estimates put the toll of the far smaller oil spill in Alaska at more than 200,000 birds (including hundreds of eagles), more than 3,000 sea mammals, more than 20 whales, and billions of fish eggs. The accident permanently wiped out the herring population of this Alaskan Gulf region. And that was an accident 1/10th the size of the Deepwater Horizon.

The final tally of the BP oil spill is almost 5 million barrels of crude, compared to only about 500,000 barrels for Exxon Valdez — a 1:10 ratio. Yes the Alaska spill happened closer inland, but the oil was not fully integrated with the water column as in the BP gusher (a far more pervasive and deadly scenario) and neither were thousands of tons of highly toxic dispersants like Corexit, a chemical that has, ironically, been banned in Britain because of its impacts on wildlife and human health.

One would be forgiven then for assuming there should be a far greater body count than what is currently being reported by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the same government office that famously blocked Anderson Cooper from peering past the 10' high barricades that had been put up to enclose a "bird receiving" area. According to the math, the count should be in the hundreds of thousands of dead birds, tens of thousands of sea mammals, and millions upon millions of fish and shellfish. So where were all the dead bodies? We should be seeing something like the mass dolphin kill off the coast of Zanzibar (left) that resulted from a much smaller offshore oil leak.

Is it possible that a massive cleanup operation in early June was focused on collecting dead animals out at sea in naturally forming "death gyres?" According to marine toxicologist Riki Ott, such gyres of dead and dying animals were common for weeks after the Exxon Valdez spill. And we know that BP was doing everything in its power to keep dead animal photographs out of the press. Kate Sheppard and Mac Mclelland of Mother Jones documented several instances of BP actually barring photography of dead animals on public beaches.

Go and read the whole thing. And stay tuned.

(H/T Queen Mum II)

When the few do not represent the many

On April 19, 1995, an American terrorist named Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. McVeigh's horrible crime killed 168 people and injured 450; many young children who'd just been dropped off at the on-site daycare center were among the casualties.

The enormous explosion not only destroyed McVeigh's target building, but also damaged many nearby structures. One of them was the St. Joseph Old Cathedral, some of the interiors of which are shown in this video, along with a little history of the building's renovation:

The old cathedral endured tremendous damage during that megaton explosion. Amazingly, the tabernacle candle remained lit throughout the violent blast. And the beautiful old crucifix with its life-size corpus remained unscratched by the flying glass and debris. [...]

After being closed for almost two years, on Dec. 1, 1997, a joyful re­dedication Mass was celebrated in the newly restored cathedral.

Here's a Google street view picture of the renovated building, which as you can see, is a traditional cathedral, complete with a crucifix atop its centermost spire:



Here's another photograph, taken from the website of St. Joseph Old Cathedral, which shows the restored building overlooking the Oklahoma City National Memorial itself (the rebuilt cathedral is across the street and half a block down from the memorial):



And here's a map view, to give you a better idea of the buildings' locations:



Jesus Wept is a moving and beautiful statue commemorating the tragedy; it's located at St. Joseph's. Jesus is shown turning away from the disaster, his hand covering his face:



Although not an official part of the memorial itself, the statue nonetheless draws many of the same visitors who travel to Oklahoma City to visit the site across the street and bear witness to the horror, destruction, and loss endured there, all at the hands of hatred and violent madness.

They come to reflect; to remember; perhaps, even, to find comfort.

No-one questions the appropriateness of rebuilding a Catholic facility, overlooking the site of the bombing, where the memorial now stands--and rightly so--even though Timothy McVeigh was raised as an Irish Catholic.

Yet right-wing demagogues, with disgraced Newt Gingrich and demented ex-governor Sarah Palin leading the way, are protesting the conversion into a Muslim community center and mosque, of an old Burlington Coat Factory building in southern Manhattan. The center will be located 2-3 blocks away from "Ground Zero", the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack wherein nineteen Al Qaida members flew planes into the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people, including Americans and citizens of some 70 countries.

Quoth Gingrich:

The proposed "Cordoba House" overlooking the World Trade Center site - where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks - is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites.

Despite numerous leaders and journalists having pointed out that the building wherein the community center and mosque will operate does not overlook Ground Zero--and indeed could not do so unless one is claiming its residents and visitors have serious X-ray vision of the sort that would permit them to see through various concrete and steel buildings--as well as the fact that the 3000 figure actually included citizens of 70 different nations, including the United States, Newt Gingrich is still, to this day, spewing his ridiculous, hate-fomenting lies on his own website (which caused my laptop and Robert's desktop computers, both Macs, to freeze and crash, by the way, so consider yourself warned.)

Is this a fair comparison, though? I can almost hear the right wing mosque-protesters whining from my house (which is in St. Petersburg, yes, but nowhere near Russia proper). Their argument, if you insist on calling it that, is bound to be a variant of this:

McVeigh wasn't a real Catholic--be was a violent radical whose behavior reflected neither the teachings of Jesus nor the lessons of the Bible!

Well, according to Muslims around the world as well as in my own sphere--including one of my sons' martial arts teachers, a devout Muslim who organized blood drives in the aftermath of 9/11; who personally drove to New Orleans with food, water, and supplies immediately after Hurricane Katrina; who continues to throw holiday parties for St. Pete's underprivileged kids every year, and who is both an outstanding example of good citizenship as well as an all-around-wonderful, community-devoted human being in my eyes--those 19 hijackers were not true followers of Islam, but rather, were violent radicals whose behavior reflected neither the teachings of the Prophet, nor the lessons of the Qur'an.

In fact, I'd highly recommend that Gingrich, Palin, et. al. familiarize themselves with the history of the religion that renders them so petrified (and that they continue to demonize in an attempt to frighten their ignorant base).

Many rights, freedoms, and moral philosophies that only came into being as underpinnings of our society in the past couple of hundred years have in fact been integral to Islamic ethics for the past millennium.

Newt Gingrich and his ilk throw around terms they believe are loaded, like Shariah law, yet they seem to be dreadfully ignorant about the actual meanings of the words that tumble from their ugly, twisted mouths and are obviously counting on their followers to focus on the horrific examples of punishment meted out by extremist governments and thus view all Muslims, and all Muslim nations, with the same level of suspicion and fear.

They speak as though the eastern philosophers of the ninth century never existed, and they babble about "freedoms" and "rights"--the very things the Party of No have been busily stripping away from Americans for the better part of the 21st century thus far--while conveniently omitting mention of the scholarly origins which gave rise to many of the tenets of modern American jurisprudence:

To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.

Just as Timothy McVeigh, and his radical beliefs and violent behaviors, did not represent Irish Catholics--or white men, or Americans--the radical extremists who wrought the destruction of the World Trade Center did not represent all Muslims.

And I believe it's worth repeating, for the benefit of the unfortunately hard of head and broken of soul, and in light of the possibility of redemption--slight though it may be--for the deafening demagogues who sing to them:

The extremist few do not represent the human many.

Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and other stone-cold bigots, do not represent me; nor do they represent my New York-born husband; nor do they represent my children.

How I go to church on Sunday mornings

Angel faces

I walk around the house at dawn
with no shoes on
and sometimes yawn
(but softly, though
as if I stepped
through quiet snow
as I did only hours ago
in dreams.)

Color falls through glass and green
and lands upon
a holy mien
and I will join
the wind's refrain
again, again
rejoicing.

-- DNT 8/1/10

Sometimes we'll feast on French toast and cheese grits with hot sauce; sometimes we'll go out for a walk, always looking to see what birds are visiting now (that's one way to tell what season it is in Florida--or at least, what the weather is like at sea, or up north: by noticing which birds are here today, because it's nicer or calmer or safer than it is where they came from.)

And there is, as ever, music--played by one of my guys, or played by someone else (a fellow worshipper, if you like)--because loving art and music, in my family, amounts to how we remind each other about that which is really important. It's how we go to church on Sundays--on any day really. And we give thanks for that, and for each other.

Donny Hathaway, voice for the ages, we're thankful you were here when you were here: